Pattern 16
A claim carries its provenance, or it is a guess
Problem. An agent writes a paragraph in which "the config sets X", "the docs recommend Y" and "this is probably Z" are typographically identical. A verified fact and a plausible invention render the same. The reader either checks everything, which defeats the point of delegating, or checks nothing, which is how a fabrication becomes a decision. The failure is not that the agent guessed. It is that the guess arrived wearing the same clothes as the fact.
Pattern. Three mechanisms, applied to load-bearing claims only.
Cite the location, not the recollection. For any claim about system state (a file's contents, a path, a config flag, a status, a line number), read the source and cite path:line before asserting. "Not found in <file>" is a complete and useful answer. A guess dressed as a finding is not.
Grade on two axes, visibly. Source reliability (A authoritative to E anecdotal) and claim credibility (1 confirmed by multiple sources to 5 unverified), tagged inline as A1 or B3. Then label each load-bearing claim [observed] (quotable from a source), [inferred] (reasoned from evidence) or [unverified]. Two axes, because a reliable source can still make a weak claim.
Record what would falsify it. A durable brief carries the date it was last verified and an explicit list of the checks that would confirm or break its conclusions. This is what lets a stale document announce its own staleness instead of quietly lying to the next reader.
Scope matters. Tag load-bearing workspace-state claims, not general reasoning or well-known facts. An [unverified] on everything carries the same information as an [unverified] on nothing.
Why this beats the obvious. The obvious instruction is "be accurate," which is unenforceable, unmeasurable, and already what the agent was trying to do. Grading is mechanical. It survives handover, it degrades gracefully (a wrong grade is still a visible grade), and it makes uncertainty legible to the next reader, including the next agent, which cannot ask what you meant and will otherwise inherit a guess as a premise. That inheritance is the real cost: an unmarked guess does not stay one claim wrong, it becomes the foundation of the next three.
The pattern also fails usefully. When a claim turns out wrong, the grade shows whether the process failed or the source did, which is the difference between fixing a habit and distrusting a document.
Cost. Friction at write time, on every claim, forever. A reader who learns the grades and then finds them applied carelessly trusts them less than no grades at all, so the discipline is all-or-nothing per document. And it does not catch the confident wrong answer drawn from a real source that says something else. For that, see Pattern 8, which measures rather than labels.
Where it lives: samples/roles/researcher.md carries the full two-axis grading scheme and the claim-evidence-inference separation it sits inside. samples/CLAUDE.md.example carries the path:line rule that extends it from research tasks to ordinary answers.
Seen in 4 of 8 teardowns · Practise: learn/06
Boundary with its neighbours. Pattern 5 governs what memory stores; this governs what an assertion carries at the moment it is made. Pattern 8 measures whether the workspace is drifting; this makes a single claim auditable without measuring anything. The three are separable: a workspace can store pointers faithfully, audit itself weekly, and still hand you a confident sentence with nothing behind it.